Energy Department's Race to 7-Day Solar Prize Competition to Speed Solar Deployment

The Energy Department on March four announced final rules for the SunShot Prize: Race to 7-Day Solar competition, which challenges innovators around the country to develop solutions to reduce the time and processes involved in installing solar energy systems.

Eligible teams will compete in 2 contests over 18 months to implement their creative solutions to cut the permit-to-plug-in time toward 7 days for small PV systems of up to 100 kilowatts or 7 weeks for large PV systems of up to one megawatt. During this period, the teams will demonstrate their innovations at-scale by deploying a minimum of ten megawatts for the small-system contest or 15 megawatts for the large-system contest.

The rate of solar energy installations across the U.S. has soared over the past few years, reaching in excess of 17 gigawatts of installed capacity-enough to power the equivalent of in excess of 3.5 million average U.S. homes. Despite tremendous gains in deployment and steady cost reductions for solar technologies, the process to install a solar energy system remains time-consuming and complex due to high non-hardware "soft costs," which currently make up in excess of half the cost of a solar energy system. See the Energy Department news release.

There are currently no comments for this story. Be the first to add a comment!
Click here to add a comment about this story.